Picture the board meeting. The trustees sit around one table, a few younger family members join them, and everyone has the same board pack in front of them with the year’s impact report on top. Some will write in the margins. Others will take their copy home and read it again on a quiet evening. Paper still earns its place in a room like that, since a page you can hold slows the conversation down in a way a shared screen rarely does. What few authors expect is that one production rule will shape the document long before it reaches the press.
Writing for a small circle of readers
A report written for the board rarely needs the bulk of a full annual review. It works better as a slim stapled booklet, with one copy for every trustee and a run no bigger than the board itself. That is the format of saddle stitched booklets, made by folding sheets in half and fixing them with metal staples through the fold, so the finished piece opens flat on the table. It does come with one fixed rule. HelloPrint produces these booklets in page counts that are multiples of four, for a mechanical reason: every folded sheet gives you four pages, one on the front, one on the back and two inside.
How many pages a stapled booklet can hold
Saddle stitching works best for shorter documents, and its ceiling sits at 92 pages, still in multiples of four. It is easy to plan a report around its content and only run into the rule at the press, and that is how a draft of 22 pages turns into 24. That extra pair deserves a purpose rather than a blank. Use one for a contents page and the other for a closing letter from the chair, or keep a page free for notes during the meeting. If the next generation is starting to join the foundation, a theme Impact Wealth explored in its interview with Chelsea Toler and Olivia Dell, a short note addressed to them belongs there too.
Ordering a run for the board
None of this calls for a large print order. For a small run of saddle stitched booklets ordered online in the US, HelloPrint lists 25 copies as one of the standard options on its order form, and shipping is part of the price rather than an extra. You pick the format, the paper and the cover, then upload a file that is ready for press. Order a few copies beyond the number of seats, so the archive keeps one and family members who missed the meeting still get their own copy.
A document like this gets read around the table and then taken home, so its shape deserves the same care as its content. Settle the page count before the writing starts and the leftover space becomes useful instead of blank. HelloPrint produces saddle stitched booklets for US customers in steps of four pages up to 92, starting from a single copy, a format that fits a short report meant for a small circle of readers.
